The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864

I must give a paragraph, at least, to the Rev. James Grahame, the good Scotch parson, were it only because he wrote a poem called "British Georgics." They are not so good as Virgil's; nor did he ever think it himself. In fact, he published his best poem anonymously, and so furtively that even his wife took up an early copy, which she found one day upon her table, and, charmed with its pleasant description of Scottish braes and burn-sides, said, "Ah! Jemmy, if ye could only mak' a book like this!" And I will venture to say that "Jemmy" never had rarer or pleasanter praise.

Shall we read a little, and test the worth of good Mistress Grahame's judgment? It is a bit of the parson's walk in "The Sabbath":—

"Now, when the downward sun has left the glens,
Each mountain's rugged lineaments are traced
Upon the adverse slope, where stalks gigantic
The shepherd's shadow thrown athwart the chasm,
As on the topmost ridge he homeward hies.
How deep the hush! the torrent's channel, dry,
Presents a stony steep, the echo's haunt.
But hark a plaintive sound floating along!
'Tis from yon heath-roofed shieling; now it dies
Away, now rises full; it is the song
Which He who listens to the hallelujahs
Of choiring seraphim delights to hear;
It is the music of the heart, the voice
Of venerable age, of guileless youth,
In kindly circle seated on the ground
Before their wicker door."

Crabbe, who was as keen an observer of rural scenes, had a much better faculty of verse; indeed, he had a faculty of language so large that it carried him beyond the real drift of his stories. I do not know the fact, indeed; but I think, that, notwithstanding the Duke of Rutland's patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is strange how many good men do,—losing point and force and efficiency in a welter of words! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need be with the ferule,) it is this,—Be short. It is amazing the way in which good men lose themselves on Sunday mornings in the lapse of their own language; and most rarely are we confronted from the pulpit with an opinion which would not bear stripping of wordy shifts, and be all the more comely for its nakedness.

George Crabbe wrote charming rural tales; but he wrote long ones. There is minute observation, dramatic force, tender pathos, but there is much, of tedious and coarse description. If by some subtile alchemy the better qualities could be thrown down from the turbid and watery flux of his verse, we should have an admirable pocket-volume for the country; as it is, his books rest mostly on the shelves, and it requires a strong breath to puff away the dust that has gathered on the topmost edges.

I think of the Reverend Mr. Crabbe as an amiable, absent-minded old gentleman, driving about on week-days in a heavy, square-topped gig, (his wife holding the reins,) in search of way-side gypsies, and on Sunday pushing a discourse—which was good up to the "fourthly"—into the "seventhly."

Charles Lamb, if he had been clerically disposed, would, I am sure, have written short sermons; and I think that his hearers would have carried away the gist of them clean and clear.

He never wrote anything that could be called strictly pastoral; he was a creature of streets and crowding houses; no man could have been more ignorant of the every-day offices of rural life; I doubt if he ever knew from which side a horse was to be mounted or a cow to be milked, and a sprouting bean was a source of the greatest wonderment to him. Yet, in spite of all this, what a book those Essays of his make, to lie down with under trees! It is the honest, lovable simplicity of his nature that makes the keeping good. He is the Izaak Walton of London streets,—of print-shops, of pastry-shops, of mouldy book-stalls; the chime of Bow-bells strikes upon his ear like the chorus of a milkmaid's song at Ware.

There is not a bit of rodomontade in him about the charms of the country, from beginning to end; if there were, we should despise him. He can find nothing to say of Skiddaw but that he is "a great creature"; and he writes to Wordsworth, (whose sight is failing,) on Ambleside, "I return you condolence for your decaying sight,—not for anything there is to see in the country, but for the miss of the pleasure of reading a London newspaper."

And again to his friend Manning, (about the date of 1800,)—"I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth and sea and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. If the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits at an old coronation,—if they can talk sensibly, and feel properly, I have no need to stand staring upon the gilded looking-glass, (that strained my friend's purse-strings in the purchase,) nor his five-shilling print, over the mantel-piece, of old Nabbs, the carrier. Just as important to me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world,—eye-pampering, but satisfies no heart. Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens, shops sparkling with pretty faces of industrious milliners, neat seamstresses, ladies cheapening, gentlemen behind counters lying, authors in the street with spectacles, lamps lit at night, pastry-cooks' and silver-smiths' shops, beautiful Quakers of Pentonville, noise of coaches, drowsy cry of mechanic watchmen at night, with bucks reeling home drunk,—if you happen to wake at midnight, cries of 'Fire!' and 'Stop thief!'—inns of court with their learned air, and halls, and butteries, just like Cambridge colleges,—old book-stalls, 'Jeremy Taylors,' 'Burtons on Melancholy,' and 'Religio Medicis,' on every stall. These are thy pleasures, O London-with-the-many-sins!—for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!"

And again to Wordsworth, in 1830,—"Let no native Londoner imagine that health, and rest, and innocent occupation, interchange of converse sweet, and recreative study, can make the country anything better than altogether odious and detestable."

Does any weak-limbed country-liver resent this honesty of speech? Surely not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith; but, the rather, by such token of unbounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his heart, for aye. There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, but a pocket Elia is as coveted and as cousinly a companion as a pocket Walton, or a White of Selborne. And upon wet days in my library, I conjure up the image of the thin, bent old gentleman—Charles Lamb—to sit over against me, and I watch his kindly, beaming eye, as he recites with poor stuttering voice,—between the whiffs of his pipe,—over and over, those always new stories of "Christ's Hospital," and the cherished "Blakesmoor," and "Mackery End."

(No, you need not put back the book, my boy; 't is always in place.)

I never admired greatly James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd; yet he belongs of double right in the coterie of my wet-day preachers. Bred a shepherd, he tried farming, and he wrote pastorals. His farming (if we may believe contemporary evidence) was by no means so good as his verse. The Ettrick Shepherd of the "Noctes Ambrosianæ" is, I fancy, as much becolored by the wit of Professor Wilson as any daughter of a duchess whom Sir Joshua changed into a nymph. I think of Hogg as a sturdy sheep-tender, growing rebellious among the Cheviot flocks, crazed by a reading of the Border minstrelsy, drunken on books, (as his fellows were with "mountain-dew,") and wreaking his vitality on Gaelic rhymes,—which, it is true, have a certain blush and aroma of the heather-hills, but which never reached the excellence that he fondly imagined belonged to them. I fancy, that, when he sat at the laird's table, (Sir Walter's,) and called the laird's lady by her baptismal name, and—not abashed in any presence—uttered his Gaelic gibes for the wonderment of London guests,—that he thought far more of himself than the world has ever been inclined to think of him. I know that poets have a privilege of conceit, and that those who are not poets sometimes assume it; but it is, after all, a sorry quality by which to win the world's esteem; and when death closes the record, it is apt to insure a large debit against the dead man.

It may not be commonly known that the Ettrick Shepherd was an agricultural author, and wrote "Hogg on Sheep," for which, as he tells us, he received the sum of eighty-six pounds. It is an octavo book, and relates to the care, management, and diseases of the black-faced mountain-breed, of which alone he was cognizant. It had never a great reputation; and I think the sheep-farmers of the Cheviots were disposed to look with distrust upon the teachings of a shepherd who supped with "lords" at Abbotsford, and whose best venture in verse was in "The Queen's Wake." A British agricultural author, speaking of him in a pitiful way, says,—"He passed years of busy authorship, and encountered the usual difficulties of that penurious mode of life."[31 - Agricultural Biography, etc. London, 1854. Printed for the Author.]

This is good; it is as good as anything of Hogg's.

I approach the name of Mr. Loudon, the author of the Encyclopædias of Gardening and Agriculture, with far more of respect. If nothing else in him laid claim to regard, his industry, his earnestness, his indefatigable labor in aid of all that belonged to the progress of British gardening or farming, would demand it. I take a pride, too, in saying, that, notwithstanding his literary labors, he was successful as a farmer, during the short period of his farm-holding.

Mr. Loudon was a Scotchman by birth, was educated in Edinburgh, and was for a time under the tutelage of Mr. Dickson, the famous nurseryman of Leith-Walk. Early in the present century he made his first appearance in London,—published certain papers on the laying-out of the public squares of the metropolis, and shortly after was employed by the Earl of Mansfield in the arrangement of the palace-gardens at Scone. In 1813 and '14 he travelled on the Continent very widely, making the gardens of most repute the special objects of his study; and in 1822 he published his "Encyclopædia of Gardening"; that of Agriculture followed shortly after, and his book of Rural Architecture in 1833. But these labors, enormous as they were, had interludes of other periodical work, and were crowned at last by his magnum opus, the "Arboretum." A man of only ordinary nerve and diligence would have taken a ten years' rest upon the completion of only one of his ponderous octavos; and the wonder is the greater, that London wrought in his later years under all the disadvantages of appeals from rapacious creditors and the infirmities of a broken constitution. Crippled, palsied, fevered, for a long period of years, he still wrought on with a persistence that would have broken many a strong man down, and only yielded at last to a bronchial affection which grappled him at his work.

This author massed together an amount of information upon the subjects of which he treated that is quite unmatched in the whole annals of agricultural literature. Columella, Heresbach, Worlidge, and even the writers of the "Geoponica," dwindle into insignificance in the comparison. He is not, indeed, always absolutely accurate on historical points;[32 - I ought, perhaps, to make definite exception in the case of a writer so universally accredited. In his "Encyclopædia of Gardening," he speaks of the "Geoponica" as the work of "modern Greeks," written after the transfer of the seat of empire to Constantinople; whereas the bulk of those treatises were written long before that date. He speaks of Varro as first in order of time of Roman authors on agriculture; yet Varro was born 116 b. c., and Cato died as early as 149 b. c. Crescenzi he names as an author of the fifteenth century; he should be credited to the fourteenth. He also commits the very common error in writers on gardening, of confounding the Tuscan villa of Pliny with that at Tusculum. These two places of the Roman Consul were entirely distinct and unlike.] but in all essentials his books are so complete as to have made them standard works up to a time long subsequent to their issue.

No notice of the agricultural literature of the early part of this century would be at all complete without mention of the Magazines and Society "Transactions," in which alone some of the best and most scientific cultivators communicated their experience or suggestions to the public. Loudon was himself the editor of the "Gardener's Magazine"; and the earlier Transactions of the Horticultural Society are enriched by the papers of such men as Knight, Van Mons, Sir Joseph Banks, Rev. William Herbert, Messrs. Dickson, Haworth, Wedgwood, and others. The works of individual authors lost ground in comparison with such an array of reports from scientific observers, and from that time forth periodical literature has become the standard teacher in what relates to good culture. I do not know what extent of good the newly instituted Agricultural Colleges of this country may effect; but I feel quite safe in saying that our agricultural journals will prove always the most effective teachers of the great mass of the farming-population. The London Horticultural Society at an early day established the Chiswick Gardens, and these, managed under the advice of the Society's Directors, have not only afforded an accurate gauge of British progress in horticulture, but they have furnished to the humblest cultivator who has strolled through their inclosures practical lessons in the craft of gardening, renewed from month to month and from year to year. It is to be hoped that the American Agricultural Colleges will adopt some similar plan, and illustrate the methods they teach upon lands which shall be open to public inspection, and upon whose culture and its successes systematic reports shall be annually made. Failing of this, they will fail of the best part of their proper purpose. Nor would it be a fruitless work, if, in connection with such experimental farm, a weekly record were issued,—giving analyses of the artificial manures employed, and a complete register of every field, from the date of its "breaking-up" to the harvesting of the crop. Every new implement, moreover, should be reported upon with unwavering impartiality, and no advertisements should be received. I think under these conditions we might almost look for an honest newspaper.

Writing thus, during these in-door hours, of country-pursuits, and of those who have illustrated them, or who have in any way quickened the edge with which we farmers rasp away the weeds or carve out our pastoral entertainment, I come upon the names of a great bevy of poets, belonging to the earlier quarter of this century, that I find it hard to pass by. Much as I love to bring to mind, over and over again, "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," I love quite as much to summon to my view Walter Scott, the woodsman of Abbotsford, with hatchet at his girdle, and the hound Maida in attendance. I see him thinning out the saplings that he has planted upon the Tweed banks. I know how they stand, having wandered by the hour among them. I can fancy how the master would have lopped away the boughs for a little looplet through which a burst of the blue Eildon Hills should come. His favorite seat, overshadowed by an arbor-vitæ, (of which a leaf lies pressed in the "Scotch Tourist" yonder,) was so near to the Tweed banks that the ripple of the stream over its pebbly bottom must have made a delightful lullaby for the toil-worn old man. But beyond wood-craft, I could never discover that Sir Walter had any strong agricultural inclination; nor do I think that the old gentleman had much eye for the picturesque; no landscape-gardener of any reputation would have decided upon such a site for such a pile as that of Abbotsford: the spot is low; the views are not extended or varied; the very trees are all of Scott's planting: but the master loved the murmur of the Tweed,—loved the nearness of Melrose, and in every old bit of sculpture that he walled into his home he found pictures of far-away scenes that printed in vague shape of tower or abbey all his limited horizon.

Christopher North carried his Scotch love of mountains to his home among the English lakes. I think he counted Skiddaw something more than "a great creature." In all respects—saving the pipes and the ale—he was the very opposite of Charles Lamb. And yet do we love him more? A stalwart, hearty man, with a great redundance of flesh and blood, who could "put the stone" with Finlayson, or climb with the hardiest of the Ben-Nevis guides, or cast a fly with the daintiest of the Low-Country fishers,—redundant of imagination, redundant of speech, and with such exuberance in him that we feel surfeit from the overflow, as at the reading of Spenser's "Faërie Queene," and lay him down with a wearisome sense of mental indigestion.

Nor yet is it so much an indigestion as a feeling of plethora, due less to the frothiness of the condiments than to a certain fulness of blood and brawn. The broad-shouldered Christopher, in his shooting-jacket, (a dingy green velveteen, with pocket-pouches all stuffed,) strides away along the skirts of Cruachan or Loch Lochy with such a tearing pace, and greets every lassie with such a clamorous outbreak of song, and throws such a wonderful stretch of line upon every pool, and amazes us with such stupendous "strikes" and such a whizzing of his reel, that we fairly lose our breath.

Not so of the "White Doe of Rylstone"; nay, we more incline to doze over it than to lose our breath. Wilson differs from Wordsworth as Loch Awe, with its shaggy savagery of shore, from the Sunday quietude and beauty of Rydal-Water. The Strid of Wordsworth was bounded by the slaty banks of the "Crystal Wharf," and the Strid of Wilson, in his best moments, was as large as the valley of Glencoe. Yet Wordsworth loved intensely all the more beautiful aspects of the country, and of country-life. No angler and no gardener, indeed,—too severely and proudly meditative for any such sleight-of-hand. The only great weight which he ever lifted, I suspect, was one which he carried with him always,—the immense dignity of his poetic priesthood. His home and its surroundings were fairly typical of his tastes: a cottage, (so called,) of homely material indeed, but with an ambitious elevation of gables and of chimney-stacks; a velvety sheen of turf, as dapper as that of a suburban haberdasher; a mossy urn or two, patches of flowers, but rather fragrant than showy ones; behind him the loveliest of wooded hills, all toned down by graceful culture, and before him the silvery mirrors of Windermere and Rydal-Water.

We have to credit him with some rare and tender description, and fragments of great poems; but I cannot help thinking that he fancied a profounder meaning lay in them than the world has yet detected.

John Clare was a contemporary of Wordsworth's, and was most essentially a poet of the fields. His father was a pauper and a cripple; not even young Cobbett was so pressed to the glebe by the circumstances of his birth. But the thrushes taught Clare to sing. He wrote verses upon the lining of his hat-band. He hoarded halfpence to buy Thomson's "Seasons," and walked seven miles before sunrise to make the purchase. The hardest field-toil could not repress the poetic aspirations of such a boy. By dint of new hoardings he succeeded in printing verses of his own; but nobody read them. He wrote other verses, which at length made him known. The world flattered the peasant-bard of Northamptonshire. A few distinguished patrons subscribed the means for equipping a farm of his own. The heroine of his love-tales became its mistress; a shelf or two of books made him rich; but in an evil hour he entered upon some farm-speculation which broke down; a new poem was sharply criticized or neglected; the novelty of his peasant's song was over. Disheartened and gloomy, he was overwhelmed with despondency, and became the inmate of a mad-house, where for forty years he has staggered idiotically toward the rest which did not come. But even as I write I see in the British papers that he is free at last. Poor Clare is dead.

With this sad story in mind, we may read with a zest which perhaps its merit alone would not provoke his little sonnet of "The Thrush's Nest":—

"Within a thick and spreading hawthorn-bush,
That overhung a mole-hill large and round,
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns, of rapture, while I drank the sound
With joy; and oft, an unintruding guest,
I watched her secret toils from day to day,—
How true she warped the moss to form her nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay,
And by-and-by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over, shells of green and blue;
And there I witnessed, in the summer hours,
A brood of Nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky."

There are pretty snatches of a Southern May in Hunt's poem of "Rimini," where

"sky, earth, and sea
Breathe like a bright-eyed face that laughs out openly.
'T is Nature full of spirits, waked and springing:
The birds to the delicious tune are singing,
Darting with freaks and snatches up and down,
Where the light woods go seaward from the town;
While happy faces striking through the green
Of leafy roads at every turn are seen;
And the far ships, lifting their sails of white
Like joyful hands, come up with scattery light,
Come gleaming up true to the wished-for day,
And chase the whistling brine, and swirl into the bay."